


Something Haunts This Diner

by GreenReticule



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28035903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenReticule/pseuds/GreenReticule
Summary: If you had missed the week its doors had closed, you could be forgiven to think that nothing had changed. A comforting thought, considering what had just happened to the Republic. Some comforts we cling to, even in the midst of galactic change, and we don't expect them to be interrupted. Especially not by something as simple as drinkware.
Relationships: Dexter Jettster & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 37





	Something Haunts This Diner

The day the Jedi Temple burned, a small, but modestly popular, CoCo Town diner shut its doors.

It reopened five days later. Its twenty-four hour schedule restored. The wait staff's territorial bickering resumed. The owner and chef as boisterous, as gregarious as he ever was. The flow of patrons resettled into normalcy, its current interrupted only by a solitary mug of chava chava.

Always at the same seat at the counter. Always hot. Never replaced. Never reheated. Not that any patron could see.

The only time the staff ever seemed to acknowledge it was when some unlucky schmuck mistook the seat as open. A hush froze over the entire establishment. None of the staff even glanced towards the offender. But the waitress' smile vanished into aristocratic composure. The droid stopped dead on the tiles. The sudden cessation of kitchen bustling was a thunderclap of silence.

Chill spread to the rest of the patrons. Not a single breath was taken until the poor fool slunk away into a booth. The smile returned, soft and glittering. The droid greeted the booth's occupant, chipper and welcoming. The kitchen resumed its comforting, if chaotic, pace. As if nothing ever happened.

The mistake was never repeated. The rumor was.

_Something haunts this diner_.

Folks with the courage to settle next to the mug of chava chava said there was a presence, almost. Just a feeling. Kind, but sad. Others, with the perspective of window seats, said the mug transformed the chef whenever he passed by it. He never looked at it, but in crossing whatever line it demarcated, there would be a straightening of his shoulders when he greeted Imperial inspectors, or a softening in his touch as he welcomed some desperate vagrant that had wandered in.

Even the schmuck took her own mortifying encounter and began weaving a story about her trespass onto the haunted seat. A phantom exchange, she claimed, could be heard. A whisper in the chef's familiar gravel charm and a soft Coruscanti accent.

_I doubt I'll be on Coruscant for much longer. The fighting will start again, perhaps within days. So keep the chava chava hot for me, yes?_

_And a seat empty, old buddy..._

All the regulars eventually made the connection back to the day the doors had shut for the first time in years. To the Jedi Temple's burning. They exchanged meaningful glances on the anniversary. Some gave nods and not-salutes towards the seat. One left their tip on the counter before the mug. The wait staff collected it, of course, but everyone knew the meaning all the same. All without anyone ever speaking a word.

Those who had been regulars before the war kept their recollections of a robed human - so familiar in the chef's embrace - to themselves. Those who caught glimpses of the staff slipping desperates into the backroom, never to be seen exiting, blamed it on the strength of the Jawa Juice brew. Those who heard the discrepancies in what the chef reported to the inspectors drowned their tongues in chava chava.

Eventually, the Imperial inspectors soon got tired of looking for reasons or even excuses. Witnesses or no, evidence or no, they came in force.

But - for the second time in an eternity - the doors had already been shut.

Not a single patron could have told the inspectors, or even each other, when it happened. It was as if, for a matter of hours, something had clouded everyone's perception of the diner. And when the cloud lifted, the diner was silent, closed, and dark.

Before being ordered away to a distance by enforcement officers, bystanders claimed to have seen the mug, solitary in its vigil, steam still rising past its rim. The schmuck was one of those who had stood, agape, as the Imperial forces swarmed in and out again, empty handed. The shcmuck was one of those who waited, watching from across the street, as the Imperials bickered over what to do before finally posting condemnation signs on the diner. The schmuck was one of those walked daily past the diner, just to make sure the Empire never tore it down.

Miraculously, it stood. Maybe too insignificant for the Empire to properly bother. Or maybe... the schmuck thought every time her reflection eclipsed the mug still in silent vigil, trespassing once again over that haunted seat. Maybe there was something else, in the whisper she kept claiming to have heard.

_...And a seat empty, old buddy. May the Force be with you._

_And with you._

The shmuck eventually left, following her phantom whisper into space. Her neighbors would whisper that the seat had cursed her somehow. The schmuck - flying through the echo of a shattered planet, into the trench of a moon, catching the whisper one more time before she gave her life for some damn idealistic crusade - would have disagreed.

Twenty years is a long time. The diner sat quietly on that street, free of schmucks and their indiscretions. And then it was found by him.

A kid - younger than the diner, with eyes far older - first saw the mug when he broke into the dereliction. It had turned cold by then, and the boy paid it no mind as he made for the backroom. He was seeking a place to hide from the last, fatal gasps of a cornered Empire.

He crossed the mug's demarcation and thought someone was at his shoulder. He looked back. He didn't see anything. Not really. Just a feeling. A phantom whisper across his vision. Something that almost formed a robed human seated before the mug, arm outstretched, a finger's point marking some spot ahead. The boy followed it.

It was not easy. But the boy had been born well after the chef had vanished; there was no way he could have known the task set before him used to take four arms, each nearly as large as he was, to complete. He did not know that it was pointless. He did not know to quit. And eventually, a hidden doorway gaped uncovered in the floor of the kitchen. A tunnel long eluded by Imperial inspectors and consecrated by the escaping desperates. Leading deep along the streets of CoCo Town and beyond. The boy stopped thinking of hiding.

Later, stories would be told of the Anklebiter Brigade. The children who had used the hidden tunnels to bring the Coruscanti Imperials to their knees. The holonews and propaganda would say those were the days that the Rebellion finally came to to the capital. The residents of CoCo Town - past and present - would have disagreed.

Rebellion had been haunting a small, but modestly popular, CoCo Town diner since the day the Jedi Temple burned.

**Author's Note:**

> Legends/Canon references:  
> Obi-Wan and Dex's conversation - Wild Space by Karen Miller  
> Dereliction of the diner and the child rebels - Empire's End by Chuck Wendig


End file.
